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Sour ales have starting becoming more and more popular recently, and certain breweries like Wicked Weed have opened specialty serving houses to distribute these rare and exotic beers. My last post talked about the emergence of the craft beer market, and some of the styles becoming prominent in label design. Over the last week I’ve made a label for a sour ale, and wanted to show my process and my passion for this type of design.

I’m a college senior, and soon will be graduating hopefully heading into a promising career in graphic design. Recently I’ve been focusing on stepping up my game and refining my style to show off what I can do, and the process of creating this beer label allowed me to do just that.

When I started the project I knew that I wanted to incorporate one of my illustrations, and have the rest of the product be themed around it. Pen and ink illustrations my favorite thing to do, particularly expressive faces and characters. I had several cartoons I considered using but ultimately decided to go with the one seen below.

Immediately I thought this face would look great on a sour beer. But I wasn’t sure where I wanted the overall theme of the label to go. I started my drafting process by taking this image into illustrator, and manipulating the color schemes.

Using the paintbrush I created three layers of color, and was then able to easily change the color scheme by simply selecting new colors for the individual layers. Below you can see some of the initial draft ideas.

To help myself and other visualize a more complete color scheme I next added a background layer.

At this point I started showing peers and friends my ideas to get some critique. Most people liked the green and light blue colors, but thought the darker schemes took away took much detail from the illustration itself, which is the core of the design. I decided to go with skin tones on the face and just use color in the background and text.

The next step was adding the details the make the make the illustration a label. I created a document with the dimensions of beer labels I had measured. I created a grid system to use in the background of my workspace so that all of the content would line up perfectly. After researching the legal requirements for my label, and what the content was going to be, I ultimately produced the label below.

Soon I’ll be printing and mounting this label onto 12.oz bottles, creating versions for growlers, six-packs, and pint bottles. Once those are done I’ll photograph the whole set and upload the images to my new online portfolio @zhollingworth.wix.com/portfolio. I’ll be continuing to refine and enhance my style through drafting and practice by making more fun crafty beer labels.